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flashback to 1997

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: flashback to 1997
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2002 11:46:41 -0400

I'm giving a presentation based on Ted Nelson's "Embedded Markup Considered 
Harmful" at Extreme this week, so I picked up my copy of the Winter 1997 
World Wide Web Journal, "XML: Priciples, Tools, and Techniques" as a prop.

I was just reading through some of the other articles again and found these 
bits:

"I think most XML processors are going to be purpose-built for the needs of 
particular applications, and will thus hide inside them.  Which is good; 
XML's simplicity makes this approach cost-effective.  Failing that, parsers 
will be full-dress validating parsers with incremental parsing for 
authoring support.  So I'm not sure that there's all that much need for a 
standalone processor, but I'd love to be wrong." [1]

"As the Web assimilates 'the universe of all network-accessible 
information', and as XML adds the metadata to define that universe, at some 
point information transubstantiates into knowledge." [2]

"It would be a blessing for all if those working on the XML standard would 
simplify entity processing a bit more and fight like the devil against any 
and all attempts to restuff the relatively Spartan design of XML with 
padding and fluff from SGML's historical legacy.  From the perspective of 
the Desperate Perl Hacker, XML would do well to simplify a bit more, and 
cannot afford to add complications of relatively little value." [3]

"We are waiting for vector graphics like Flash.  Flash images will be 
tiny.  They will look great.  They will be as close as you can get to 
PostScript without making a PDF." [4]

"Despite the limitations of CSS described here we have found that the 
language comes close to meeting our needs.  This, combined with the fact 
that CSS is already implemented for HTMLin the major Web browsers - and our 
sense that the simplicity of CSS will appeal to Web designers over more 
complex (albeit more powerful) approaches - leads us to believe that CSS 
will be the dominant mechanism for displaying XML documents on the Web." [5]

[1] - Bray, Tim.  "An Introduction to XML Processing with Lark", p.178.
[2] - Khare, Rohit, and Rifkin, Adam. "Capturing the State of Distributed 
Systems with XML", p. 216.
[3] - Leventhal, Michael. "XML: Can the Desperate Perl Hack Do It?", p.163.
[4] - Siegel, David.  "The Web is Ruined, and I Ruined It", p. 18.
[5] - Culshaw, Stuart, Leventhal, Michael, and Maloney, Murray. "XML and 
CSS", p.116

http://www.xml.com/search/index.ncsp?sp-q=W3J


Simon St.Laurent
"Every day in every way I'm getting better and better." - Emile Coue

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